


the sentence

by unhedged



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-24
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2020-10-27 09:13:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20757935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unhedged/pseuds/unhedged
Summary: don't be deceived by these words.





	the sentence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [qmisato](https://archiveofourown.org/users/qmisato/gifts).

I wish I could begin this story with something concrete.

A death or a birth. A slap across the cheek. A gunshot.

Maybe an apocalypse, or two.

But I have to start with a unnameable place at a time and a day I can't for the life of me remember.

There is a dusty phone booth creaking under the weight of the sun somewhere in the outskirts of the city. There is a bus stop with the sign rusted beyond recognition. There is a card in my hand. The card is red. Red like old blood. There, it is becoming concrete, are you satisfied?

Later, there is a man sitting behind a half-opened door and I'm watching him. He is old, grey hair, wrinkled skin. I keep my eyes on his knotted fingers handcuffed behind his back -- far from a thing of beauty -- just to keep my eyes off of you.

There's something I want to ask you, you say.

I say nothing. I'm not supposed to hear you, and besides, I have lost my bad habit of dispensing answers. It is as I've said to Commander Ikari, that I've been reading books on theoretical biology, metaphysics and parallel universes. Only yesterday I realized that I needed one to tell me the answers to questions that nobody else is asking. Namely, how to plant an apple tree and how to go back in time.

I learn that time is tied to gravity, that one might return from the sun to find that her siblings have aged to resemble her father and mother. That the closer one gets to the center of it all, the slower the hand of the clock ticks, while out there beyond this wretched earth you speed from eleven to twenty-five to eighty-three and reach the conclusion of life faster than the blink of an eye. And still there is no going backward.

As consolation, the human mind offers its own time machine: we travel in memory. This is a disappointing compromise, I'm sure you agree. The mind is fickle, besides. I realize that I never imagined what you might look like all grown and now that it comes time to look, I can't decide if you should be a boy or a man.

The long ash of my cigarette falls to the ground.

You extend your foot and rub it into the soil. The old man has left. The sun has turned russet. There is just me.

How old are you now? I ask.

I should be eleven, maybe twenty-seven now, you say. For a moment, you seem lost. There's something I want to ask you, you say. How can I delay my death? How can I write my own sentence?

I wonder, I do. You see, in my dreams I still go to that other time. I dream that we are hiding still in sewers and eating scraps like rats, that it is possible we would be children forever. I don't dream of a time that has never existed. I don't dream of you, a stubbled man with adult problems, a cloying wife, a dull job and two unruly children. I dream of running after you, breathless, tins of food spilling out of my arms. I dream that our shared time goes on. 

You shake your head, and you say, when life is your enemy, then death becomes your friend. Then you say, a good story needs a skeptic. You need a villain and many a cruel people. You need a collapsing world and a dying age. A dog-eat-dog world. And if there are no survivors, none can bear witness, you say.

So I tell you, here, this is how our sentence is written. You don't know where to go but the path you take is always the right one. A door appears. A key appears. A hall opens up before you. Down that dim corridor you walk to swap a rice grain of a chip with a rice grain, and in this way the men of SEELE will lose their way in the mazes of NERV, and in this way your friends will have the time they need to save themselves.

An elevator appears. A keypad appears. The password writes itself. That way you find Rei in the womb of the machine and you tell her about the other Ikari, and thus make her whole in herself. Through the other door you find Ritsuko, and you give her the souvenir from Matsushiro that you've kept in your pocket all this while. This, to remind her that you remember. Down the stairs and through the hall you find Ibuki, Hyuga, Shigeru, and you tell them what is true.

Now, listen close. You drive through the night to her apartment and there you wait until she returns. You delete my voicemail message. When she opens the door, you stand and say okaeri. You tell her the news about me in one breath, and if she starts to cry, you hold her. You knock on the boy's door and ask him to come out. You make dinner for the three of you, a feast for kings made from scraps. You wish her happy birthday. You call for the girl to come home, and you let her pick the game and lose to her for a few rounds.

The next morning you wake up and water the flowers. The following morning you plant an apple tree. The next morning you wake up and water the flowers and the tree, and in this way you survive. This way you bear witness.

And if anything has been changed by these sentences, it is that you no longer need to hide. Boy or man, you can show your face to the world. You have all the time now to stroll and soak in the sunshine. For you, I could forever delay the end of this story. So that you wouldn't get buried in its phrases, so that you would go on, forever.

But I'm sorry that I am running out of time, when for the longest time it felt as if the only distance between you and I was time. That I could find you if only I knew how to walk toward the past, or so far into the future that I find myself where I started. The world is a perfect circle. This is a story that repeats. You have always felt so close.

And it was never meant to be a good ending, I say to you. I don't say, it was meant to be true. Because it isn't.

So don’t be deceived by these words. I can weave a story as a dream and tell it that way. I can disguise my past into pithy anecdotes, and as I conceal it I make metaphors, and as I tell tales about these metaphors, I can make them seem stranger than truth, and in this way, I deceive the world and, most of all, you.

Before the first sentence was written, I thought of an ending in which you would atone for my sins.

I'm running out of time. I've always wanted to start this story with a setting so concrete that it overwhelms reality. I want to describe you in the realest way I could. But now that you're here, I see that my wants are nothing more than a desire for evidence. Finger in the wound, oh doubting Thomas. After all atonement is footless like ghosts. This you already know.

You're not here. No other version of this story exists. I've run out of time.

Footsteps approach.

"You're late."


End file.
